Bush's Iraq "Surge": The Fraud Exposed
by Robert Freeman
Published on Tuesday, January 23, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0123-26.htm (http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0123-26.htm)
If ever proof was needed that the president's "surge" plan in Iraq is actually a ruse, a guise for something else, it came yesterday.
Five American soldiers were killed when a group of Iraqis dressed in American army uniforms penetrated a secure government compound in the Baghdad suburb of Karbala. The insurgents drove an armored GMC SUV - standard US government issue - through multiple checkpoints to enter the compound, one of the most protected areas in Iraq.
Once inside, they drove directly to a building housing security officials planning counter-insurgency activity. They opened fire on a meeting in progress, targeting only Americans. After 20 minutes of exchanged gunfire, the attackers got back in their SUV and drove away. Iraqi officials noted that the attack was striking for the sophistication of its planning and execution.
Amid all the carnage and chaos that is Iraq, why is this attack noteworthy? And what does it say about the plausibility of the president's "surge" strategy?
The attack is noteworthy because it mirrors some of the reasons for failure of the American war in Vietnam. Simply put, the US could never get the Army of South Vietnam (ARVN) to carry the burden in fighting the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. That is why in 1965 Lyndon Johnson decided that if the war was to be won, he would have to pour in hundreds of thousands of US troops to do the fighting themselves.
The reasons for ARVN's refusal to fight were straightforward. They perfectly presage the problems with the Iraqi army today.
First, many of the soldiers in the South Vietnamese Army were themselves either indifferent or even hostile to the U.S. presence in Vietnam. They saw the damage the war inflicted on their country and wanted the U.S. to leave. They took every opportunity - sometimes passive, sometimes active - to sabotage their government's cooperation with the Americans.
Second, because promotion in the army was based not on experience or leadership but rather on loyalty, corruption, or family connections, the quality of the officer corps was exceptionally poor. Soldiers refused to put their lives at risk under the direction of inexperienced, cowardly, or corrupt officers. They routinely failed to show up for important missions and showed no initiative in the field, holding back under fire to avoid injury or death.
Finally and most importantly, the whole of the army (and the civilian bureaucracy as well) had been infiltrated by the Viet Cong. As a consequence, army maneuvers were routinely disclosed to the enemy before they ever began. This made it a near certainty that aggressive operations would be ambushed, that fighting would be fierce, and that losses would be high.
The U.S. military understood this infiltration well.
Thus, whenever possible, to preserve its own element of surprise and protect its own forces, the U.S kept ARVN out of the loop of planning for field operations.
All of these conditions apply literally unchanged in Iraq. When over 80% of the population want the Americans to leave, when more than 60% believe it is acceptable to target Americans, it is quite literally impossible to constitute an army that does not contain much of the same poisoned sentiment.
And when jobs are obtained by tribal or sectarian connections, and when the job is more a matter of a paycheck than of putting your life on the line, it is inevitable that discipline and ardor will be weak.
And the greatest vulnerability, of course, is infiltration. When everything the U.S. does - from getting food on the mess tables to the logistics of ammunition, fuel, and weapons transport - depends on the goodwill and assistance of Iraqis, the mission is already lost. For it only takes one infiltrator to doom a patrol, to sabotage a firefight, to pass killers through checkpoints as friends.
All of this is very well known to commanding officers in Iraq, all of whom have studied the reasons for U.S. failure in Vietnam. This is why the U.S. army refuses to provide any more weapons to the Iraqi army: they know they will just end up in the hands of hostile insurgents, the way the uniforms and SUV did in the firefight yesterday. The same thing happened in Vietnam. A 1967 study in the field revealed that 36% of weapons captured from Viet Cong soldiers were of American manufacture.
But if the U.S. cannot trust those it is training to take over the fighting, if it will not provide them the arms to take over the fighting, what are the odds they will be able to, in fact, take over the fighting? Of course, they are zero. For that is not really the plan.
The "surge" plan has always been a fraud. If, as president Bush has claimed, loss in Iraq would be "catastrophic for the U.S." does 21,000 troops begin to rise to the level of the purported threat? Before the war began, General Eric Shinseki told Donald Rumsfeld it would take 500,000 to 600,000 troops to secure the country. There are now 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and the bedlam vastly exceeds what it was going in. Can raising the troop level to 161,000 now possibly make any difference? It is patently a sham.
Whatever the "surge" is really for - whether it's to support an attack on Iran or just a cynical ploy to not "lose" the war on Bush's watch - it is clearly not about winning. We need to end the charade and demand an immediate reversal before the escalation becomes worse.
Robert Freeman writes about economics, history, and education. Email to: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1022-26.htm (http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1022-26.htm)) also appeared on CommonDreams.
Senate committee repudiates Bush on Iraq
By Anne Flaherty, Associated Press Writer
Published January 24, 2007 by Yahoo! News
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070124/ap_on_go_co/us_iraq (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070124/ap_on_go_co/us_iraq)
The Democratic-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee dismissed President Bush's plans to increase troops strength in Iraq on Wednesday as "not in the national interest," an unusual wartime repudiation of the commander in chief.
The vote on the nonbinding measure was 12-9 and largely along party lines.
"We better be damn sure we know what we're doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder," said Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, the sole Republican to join 11 Democrats in support of the measure.
Sen. Joseph Biden D-Del., the panel's chairman, said the legislation is "not an attempt to embarrass the president. ... It's an attempt to save the president from making a significant mistake with regard to our policy in Iraq."
The full Senate is scheduled to begin debate on the measure next week, and Biden has said he is willing to negotiate changes in hopes of attracting support from more Republicans.
House Democrats intend to hold a vote shortly after the Senate acts.
Even Republicans opposed to the legislation expressed unease with the revised policy involving a war that has lasted nearly four years, claimed the lives of more than 3,000 U.S. troops and helped Democrats win control of Congress in last fall's elections.
"I am not confident that President Bush's plan will succeed," said Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, senior Republican on the committee.
But he said in advance he would vote against the measure. "It is unclear to me how passing a nonbinding resolution that the president has already said he will ignore will contribute to any improvement or modification of our Iraq policy."
"The president is deeply invested in this plan, and the deployments ... have already begun," Lugar added.
He suggested a more forceful role for Congress, and said lawmakers must ensure the administration is "planning for contingencies, including the failure of the Iraqi government to reach compromises and the persistence of violence despite U.S. and Iraqi government efforts."
Separately, Vice President Dick Cheney said passage of a Senate resolution would not change the administration's new strategy in Iraq.
"The Congress has control over the purse strings. They have the right, obviously, if they want, to cut off funding," Cheney said in an interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN.
"But in terms of this effort, the president has made his decision. We've consulted extensively with them. We'll continue to consult with the Congress. But the fact of the matter is, we need to get the job done."
Divisions over the war were on clear display as the committee met.
Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., said he wanted to change the measure to say flatly that the number of troops in Iraq "may not exceed the levels" in place before Bush announced his new policy. The suggestion failed, 15-6.
Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., sought to amend the legislation to show support for an increase troops in the Anbar province in western Iraq, but not in Baghdad, where the sectarian violence is particularly fierce. His proposal also fell, 17-4.
Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., chastised fellow lawmakers, accusing them of being reticent to respond to Bush's plans. He said he would seek passage of legislation at a later date cutting off funds for the war.
Hagel's remarks were among the most impassioned of the day, and he was unstinting in his criticism of the White House.
"There is no strategy," he said of the Bush administration's war management. "This is a pingpong game with American lives. These young men and women that we put in Anbar province, in Iraq, in Baghdad are not beans; they're real lives. And we better be damn sure we know what we're doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder."
A Vietnam veteran, he fairly lectured fellow senators not to duck a painful debate about a war that has grown increasingly unpopular as it has gone on. "No president of the United States can sustain a foreign policy or a war policy without the sustained support of the American people," Hagel said.
At least eight Republican senators, including Hagel, say they now back legislative proposals registering objections to Bush's decision to boost U.S. military strength in Iraq by 21,500 troops.
The growing list â€" which includes Sens. Gordon Smith, George Voinovich and Sam Brownback â€" has emboldened Democrats, who are pushing for a vote in the full Senate by next week to rebuke the president's Iraq policy.
In his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, Bush urged skeptical members of Congress to give the plan a chance to work.
Many lawmakers remained reluctant.
"I wonder whether the clock has already run out," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. She said she was worried that U.S. troops in Iraq are already perceived "not as liberators but as occupiers."
Bush did get a word of support from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, one of the 2008 Republican presidential hopefuls.
"I believe we should give the president the support to do this. I want us to be successful in Iraq," he said Wednesday on NBC's "Today" show. "I know how important it is to the overall war on terror. Success in Iraq means a more peaceful world for America, it means a victory against terrorists. Failure in Iraq means a big defeat against terrorists and the war on terror is going to be tougher for us."
But Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., appearing on the same show, said, "I think all of us are talking about a phased redeployment which would leave American troops in the region to send a strong message, not only to the Iraqi government that we want to help them, but also to neighbors, like Iran, that we're not abandoning the field."
No such vote would have won just a short time ago, the taking down of the little King has begun in earnest, and his nightmarish war on the world is going to be ended...non-binding resolutions may seem toothless, but they will be followed by stronger measures...the goal being a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate to cut off funding to the War. It will take time, but there is a path being laid right now. Bush could have at any point bent a little, given a little ground, shown willingness to work with other countries, with the UN, with the Congress, but he has refused all but his Puppet Masters. When we break him, he will stay broken. Stay tuned...